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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

As Witkoff and Huckabee staged a humanitarian photo op, dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israelis

As Witkoff and Huckabee staged a humanitarian photo op, dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israelis

Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous report: President Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured an “aid distribution” site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah in southern Gaza on Friday. During the U.S. envoy’s highly stage-managed visit, at least 82 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the enclave, including 49 people seeking food aid with more than 270 injured. The visit came as the leading international authority on food crises—the…

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The starvation of Gaza is shameful. Crippling sanctions on Israel are needed, say Israeli public figures

The starvation of Gaza is shameful. Crippling sanctions on Israel are needed, say Israeli public figures

The Guardian reports: A group of high-profile Israeli public figures, including academics, artists and public intellectuals, has called for “crippling sanctions” to be imposed by the international community on Israel, amid mounting horror over its starvation of Gaza. The 31 signatories of a letter to the Guardian include an Academy award recipient, Yuval Abraham; a former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency; and a number of…

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France and Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state won’t end Israel’s onslaught

France and Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state won’t end Israel’s onslaught

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write: Almost two years into a conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives, amid an Israeli military campaign and humanitarian blockade that have reached apocalyptic proportions, and faced with their own powerlessness as they bear witness to what growing numbers of experts call a genocide, Emmanuel Macron has announced France’s dramatic next step: it will recognize a Palestinian state in September. Keir Starmer quickly followed suit, stating that the UK would do likewise…

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Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

By Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News, photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This story was originally published by ProPublica Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his…

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Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

  Editor-at-large of “Jewish Currents,” who writes “The Beinart Notebook” on Substack, Peter Beinart sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss his book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” and speaking out against Israel. They talk about learning from Jewish history to be the saviors rather than the oppressors, America and the U.N.’s failure to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable, the urgency of engaging in critical discourse with other Jews, and how listening to Palestinian stories can illuminate…

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Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports: Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives….

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Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods — an effort to fight what the administration calls “vagrancy” threatening the streets of U.S. cities. An executive order signed Thursday pushes federal agencies to overturn state and federal legal precedent that limits how local and state governments can involuntarily commit people who pose a risk to themselves or…

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Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

  A former US veteran who was employed at a food distribution site in Gaza has accused members of the Israel Defence Forces and American colleagues of deliberately targeting and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians. Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar, a former special forces veteran, was recruited to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-US scheme replacing the United Nations food distribution operation in Gaza. He has told the BBC he witnessed the IDF shooting at the crowds of Palestinians, firing…

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‘We are starving’

‘We are starving’

Ruwaida Amer writes: I am so hungry. I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over. Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words…

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Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

NPR reports: Carlos Daniel Terán, 19, still remembers the words a prison warden told him when he entered El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. “He told us we were never going to leave this place,” Terán recalled. It was March of this year. Terán had just been transferred from an immigration detention center in Texas to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — known as CECOT — a maximum-security prison built to house accused Salvadoran gang members. El Salvador’s own justice…

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Israel’s claim that Hamas stole aid was baseless, while UN system was effective, senior military officials reveal

Israel’s claim that Hamas stole aid was baseless, while UN system was effective, senior military officials reveal

The New York Times reports: For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza. But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military…

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Trump is building concentration camps faster than Hitler did

Trump is building concentration camps faster than Hitler did

Will Bunch writes: When it comes to the topic of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer wrote the book — literally. The Washington, D.C.-area writer’s own personal curiosity about the origins and history of this inhumane practice — and her sense that many people view the subject too narrowly through the lens of Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin’s USSR — sparked her 2017 book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. Although her book traces the long arc of cruel…

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Israeli minister says his government is ‘rushing toward Gaza being wiped out’

Israeli minister says his government is ‘rushing toward Gaza being wiped out’

The New York Times reports: Amid rising starvation in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli government minister said on Thursday that Israel had no duty to alleviate hunger in the territory and was seeking to expel its population. Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right lawmaker who leads Israel’s Heritage Ministry, said in a radio interview that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies,” adding that “the British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians…

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As starvation grips Gaza, skeletal children fill hospital wards

As starvation grips Gaza, skeletal children fill hospital wards

The Guardian reports: Mohammed’s skeletal arms stick out of a romper with a grinning emoji-face and the slogan “smiley boy”, which in a Gaza hospital reads as a cruel joke. He spends much of the day crying from hunger, or gnawing at his own emaciated fingers. At seven months old, he weighs barely 4kg (9lbs) and this is the second time he has been admitted for treatment. His face is gaunt, his limbs little more than bones covered in baggy…

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Albuquerque takes the lead in standing up for immigrants

Albuquerque takes the lead in standing up for immigrants

City Desk ABQ reports: Mayor Tim Keller signed an executive order July 21 reaffirming Albuquerque as a city of refuge, directing police to help residents identify immigration agents and limiting city cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Unveiled at City Hall with immigrant advocates, city councilors and state leaders, the order puts new limits on how the city works with federal immigration enforcement. It tells police to clarify when immigration agents are in the area and bars city departments from helping…

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There is no safe place for legal immigrants in Trump’s America

There is no safe place for legal immigrants in Trump’s America

The American Prospect reports: The federal agents stationed outside immigration courtrooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan wore face coverings, either medical masks or neck gaiters pulled up over their noses. Some obscured their identity further with sunglasses and baseball hats. None displayed their names or badge numbers, though one wore a T-shirt with a picture of a skull and the words “we the people defend liberty.” Assembled in three separate groups, they lingered casually as they waited for their…

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